AcctTwo Blog

At AcctTwo, we believe that the finance and accounting function and the CFO should be a strategic business partner to their organizations, and they have a unique opportunity to help build the future of those organizations. A recent article in the International Business Times titled, "The Future of Finance Is Connected Finance" does a wonderful job of illustrating that perspective. The article focuses on the concept of "connected finance" and its importance to this vision of the role of the modern CFO and finance teams.

Deployment options were hardly a consideration ten years ago. Most accounting solutions were licensed and hosted by a third party or deployed on your own premises. “SaaS” was a poorly understood and relatively new concept. “Cloud” was not even part of the business vernacular yet. Solutions like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) were heading in that direction, but entrusting your records to cloud-based accounting software required a higher level of trust that had not been developed yet. 

At a certain point every business has to upgrade its accounting software. Solutions like QuickBooks may be adequate to start, but not once businesses begin to grow and diversify. Committing to an upgrade is an important step for future success. The question is what kind of upgrade to pursue.

In the new book “Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future—and What to Do About It,” author Tien Tzuo argues that services are becoming more important than products. Most of us already rely on services like Netflix or Amazon Prime, and the idea of paying for access rather than ownership will soon become standard.

There is a reason SaaS has become the dominant approach to business applications: It makes more sense for both the user and the provider. Users get better tools at a lower cost while providers can count on a steady stream of revenue and closer client relations.

The only downside of running a dynamic SaaS company is that performance is hard to track and difficult to define. Success and failure are driven by multiple variables, and it’s easy to mistake positives for negatives and vice versa.

Rolling out a next-generation, enterprise-class software solution is a major undertaking. As a result, the day the software goes live often feels like crossing the finish line. In reality, it’s more like the halfway point of the race.

In our previous articles on How We Work, we talked about how social media is changing the way we interact and collaborate at work, and we explored the early history of workflow and its challenges. In this third installment, we'd now like to talk about how computers and networking have revolutionized workflow, taking us into the 21st Century, and touching on the advances and challenges of today.

Embrace Change or Suffer the Consequences

Accounting systems are not something you change or replace very often. However, as your software company grows in size or complexity, prepares to go public, or is already a public company, you will reach a point where manual processes are draining your productivity and you struggle to analyze the growing range of your financial and operating data. You’ll need a better way to handle accounting within your software company. You’ll need to modernize your system.

This may be something those of us in the cloud-based accounting software industry talk about a lot, but hearing it from a consultant who sells Quickbooks really drives it home:

We're Harping on this for a Reason

I know we keep harping on what true SaaS is and what “cloud-based” means, and that perhaps it sounds like we’re getting caught up in semantics, but there is a reason for our fixation - why we're shouting from the rooftops. There are huge advantages in cloud-based SaaS ERP solutions. Some advantages, like configurability and real-time reporting and dashboard analytics, are obvious to customers and end-users. Other advantages, like multi-tenancy, allow for cost savings on the part of vendors in the implementation, updates, and maintenance of the software that customers then see in their lower total cost of ownership.